RIP Kevin Turvey

I hope you’ll forgive me if I add a final paragraph to the plethora of tributes paid to the comedy genius Rik Mayall, who died last Monday. I feel justified in claiming this last word, because I was involved in his first – I gave Rik his first big break. 

What do you do at the office, Daddy?

When the teacher at Izzy’s new school invited me to give a talk to the children about my work, Izzy was very excited. 

“I love it when Daddy comes to talk about his work,” she said. 

“Really?” I replied with surprise, trying to remember when I’d been to her previous school to talk about television. I didn’t think I’d even discussed my profession with Izzy. Maybe she had overheard Mummy and Daddy talking about our pitches to the network executives in America. But why would that make her so excited? 

“Daddy, when you come to talk at the school about your work, please can we make cookies as well.” 

That was a bit random. 

“Izzy, what do you think Daddy actually does at work?” 

“You make bread, of course”.

Jumping up and down in muddy puddles

Izzy’s hero Peppa Pig loves jumping up and down in muddy puddles. 

Quite how the UK’s broadcasters ever allowed this cartoon celebrity to trigger such an increase in the nation’s laundry bills is beyond me. I thought there were regulators who banned programmes that incite anti-social behaviour. 

“Let’s go jumping up and down in muddy puddles,” says Peppa to the rotund Daddy Pig, whom Izzy, rather unkindly, says looks exactly like me. 

Robots -- every home should have one

Sir James Dyson wants to develop household robots that can take on all our household chores. No more cleaning, putting out the dustbins, or replacing lightbulbs – what bliss. 

I hope his robots last longer than his vacuum cleaners.

The visitor

At 8pm last Saturday night, the phone rang in my hotel room. The receptionist sounded suspicious and protective. 

“There’s a, er, gentleman here who wants to talk to you.” 

I was expecting him. 

“It's OK, we have an appointment – please tell him I’ll be right down.” 

She sounded only a little relieved. When I saw him sitting silently on a sofa in the corner of the reception area, I understood her reticence.

The magic of Doctor Who

[The Doctor Who 50th anniversary special was on BBC1 last night.]


I was eleven when I first saw Susan Foreman and her grandfather. 

Susan was a pupil at Coal Hill School in Shoreditch, and her teachers were worried about her because she had a strange take on the world. Almost alien, you might say. 

Coal Hill School was on television on Saturday night, watched by millions around the world. It’s the most famous fictional school in Britain, for Susan’s grandfather was William Hartnell, the original Doctor Who, and they had stopped off in Shoreditch while he was trying to fix a technical bug in their Tardis, which caused it to keep its shape as a London police box when travelling through time.

The Reunion

"We take the A train," said our leader, squinting at the map, before exclaiming like Captain Mainwaring, “This way, chaps.” 

We struggled to keep up. Ahead of him were two large signs – one with a large red A pointing right, the other left with a B indicating left. 

“Look, there’s the train,” shouted the leader, confidently turning left. 

I opened my mouth to protest, then saw that it was a double decker. None of us had ever been on a train with an upstairs. We were like excited schoolboys as we clambered aboard. 

Memories are made of this

Mel Smith RIP

Tyne - picture from Side Gallery

It’s been a week of stirred memories. 

Live Theatre’s production of Tyne was a treat. Michael Chaplin had encased this compilation of Tynerabilia within a loose-fitting narrative about an ex-pat Geordie who returns for his father’s funeral. It was undisguised sentimental indulgence – a perfect show for the theatre and the region. I’m rather glad Jo didn’t go: my American wife wouldn’t have understood a single reference. 

As I spent my own childhood in Tynemouth, in a house that looked out over the two piers, the play was two hours of nostalgia-inducing pleasure.

The Space Precinct Legacy

The cinema billed it as “the story of the most ambitious television series ever made”. Outside, the hoarding lit up the night sky: Space Precinct Legacy. 

I can’t believe that anyone actually remembers Space Precinct, the 1994 sci-fi series I co-produced with Gerry Anderson, let alone that it has any legacy, other than grey hairs on my head and a big red loss on the books of our backers.

Inside the BBC's New Broadcasting House

When he becomes director-general in March, I wonder if Tony Hall will have his own desk, or just a filing cabinet to store his stuff. 

Think I’m joking? I’ve just been to the BBC’s new headquarters, and I’m afraid Tony is in for a bit of a shock.

The King-Maker

[Why Tony Hall was always going to become the BBC’s director general] 

Eric Stadlen, our tutor, was adamant. 

“Vun of you vill be director-general,” he told us in his deep, thick Austrian accent.

Don't Quit While You're Behind

Some say the secret of true success is to quit while you’re behind. Sadly it’s not something I’m very good at. 

Take my tomato plants, for example.

Nine Days To Their Biggest Challenge

I’d never heard of the Paralympics until 1991.

Three years earlier, in Seoul, our able-bodied athletes won just five gold medals. In that same month our disabled athletes broke 18 world records, and brought home 182 medals, including 64 golds.

While Steve Redgrave, Linford Christie, Adrian Moorhouse, Colin Whitbread and Fatima Whitbread became household names, the public scarcely noticed the achievements of their disabled colleagues. Neither did I.

Then in 1991, while I was producing Challenge Anneka for the BBC, we received a call from the British Paralympic Association asking for help.

Fessing Up

Like the comedian Jimmy Carr, I too have to fess up.

You know all those dodgy investments in the film industry? The ones where people make loans to movies that are never going to make money, and get massive tax write-offs? The schemes where footballers, tycoons and comedians avoid paying the same tax rate as poor people? Well, I’m just a teeny bit responsible.

20 years ago, I was surprised to find myself elected chair of PACT, the trade body representing Britain’s film and television producers. This surprise was derived from the fact that, although I had a certain amount of experience in television, I had no track record in cinema. Like any movie-goer, though, I was concerned about the moribund state of our industry: around 95% of films in our cinemas were American and only a handful of low budget British arthouse films managed to make it to distribution each year.

It wasn’t for lack of talent: Hollywood was full of British technicians and actors, while the industry back home was on its last legs. This was culturally disastrous, so I asked my film colleagues how to get British films kick started, and they unanimously replied: “tax breaks”. They needed new sources of external investment, and were lobbying government for incentives to persuade companies and rich individuals to back them. The producers wanted to make commercial movies, and maybe get rich in the process; I thought it a good idea because I didn’t want my children being brought up on a diet of Americana.

But PACT knew that neither case would wash with government. What we needed was a good financial argument that commercial British films would be good for Britain. We worked out that £20million in tax breaks would generate hundreds of millions of extra revenue for Britain through the employment of crews, the technical services and studios, the hotels and restaurants in the locations we filmed in, and, ultimately, the revenue that returned through tax on profits. Surely it was worth a little tax concession to get the ball rolling?

So we started a campaign. It was called Impact, and we launched it at a rather grand breakfast in London’s Savoy Hotel. Like any celebrity event we got plenty of publicity – I was even grilled by John Humphrys on the Today programme about why on earth we luvvies should get special treatment. To the Tory government of the day our campaign fell on deaf ears. So instead we targeted Gordon Brown, and built a robust financial model to prove the case.

Four years later our tax breaks were one of the first things he announced as the new Chancellor. The extraordinary thing was, it worked. British films thrived and money flowed into Britain. There was one problem: a lot of individuals who didn’t really have the film industry at their heart jumped on the bandwagon and created schemes solely for the tax breaks. And then persuaded comedians and footballers to put their money in. And they still do. Sorry about that, everyone.

Of course, one of the reasons people use these schemes is because our British tax system is so darned complicated. I count myself as reasonably intelligent and numerate, yet every year when my accountant sends me my tax return with a letter saying “Please check the contents and, if you are happy, sign”, I’ve never been able to understand a single word it says. So I trust that his substantial fees reflect his genius for doing what is right and legal, and I sign anyway. Which is presumably what Jimmy Carr did. Except it wasn’t right, was it?

Britain would probably be a lot better off if we just simplified the whole process. Let’s have a £10,000 tax-free allowance for everyone, then a single 30% tax rate, withheld at source, for wages, services, businesses, investments, everything. Meanwhile, scrap stamp duty, inheritance tax and other unnecessary complications. Of course the result would be thousands of redundant tax inspectors and accountants. Maybe they could set up a film company? They could call it ‘21st Century Tax’. Somehow I doubt they’d find any investors.

A Campaign For Live Television

For two weeks, Channel 4’s daytime gameshow Deal or No Deal is broadcasting live for the first time in its history. As a result, it’s audience has increased substantially.

I’m not surprised: viewers can really sense the tension and peril of live television. So much of what we watch these days is manufactured, edited and homogenized. From reality shows to talent competitions, producers do their best to artificially inject tension and jeopardy into the safely pre-recorded mix, but it’s rarely convincing. There’s something about the security of recording that saps suspense, and I’m sure our relentlessly vacuous daytime output really benefited from the thrill of potential disaster. Noel Edmonds, probably the best live entertainment presenter Britain has ever had, is the ideal host for the experiment.

As a producer, nothing quite matches the thrill of live TV. For the first dozen years of my career, I was a studio director, sitting in a darkened control room facing banks of monitors, calling the shots and trying to hold it all together. All too often the fragile bubble burst and the show descended into chaos.

That embarrassing episode of Panorama, where David Dimbleby sits alone in front of a solitary camera with nothing to say for 11 minutes because the film has broken down? That was me at the end of the telephone helpfully telling him to “just keep talking”. That live Nationwide episode when a lady judge keeled over in a dying faint and the presenter just stepped over her recumbent body? I was directing that night, too. Grace Jones hitting Russell Harty? It was my voice in his earpiece, foolishly telling him to ignore her.

Yet the more things go wrong, the more audiences seems to enjoy it. It makes the viewing experience somehow more real and the viewers more connected.

Nowadays viewers can turn even pre-recorded programmes into live viewing experiences by texting or tweeting their friends with comments about the content. I reckon that around 80% of all young people use phones or iPads while they are watching television, often to communicate with each other about what they’re watching. Channel 4 News positively encourages viewers to debate the issues on the programme using Twitter.

Next Wednesday I’ll be speaking at a conference in Leeds about “second screen technology”, where viewers will be able to have a live, parallel, two-way experience with a television programme, using their mobile phones. I guarantee it’s the next big thing for our industry, and I’m proud that our Newcastle-based company, ScreenReach, has developed world-beating technology to facilitate it.

The problem is, actual live television, what we in the trade call “event” television, still costs a great deal of money. Now that high definition cameras and cheap editing software are on sale in any high street electronics store, anyone can become a television producer. Yet it still takes guts and a very large outside broadcast unit to go live.

I do hope that, following the publication of its long-awaited strategy review “Delivering Quality First”, the BBC remembers to include plenty of live shows for the nation to enjoy. Most of its other recommendations seem pretty spot on.

I would say that, though, wouldn’t I? In January I gave a speech at a media conference where I proposed five key changes for the BBC. These were: move BBC Three to Salford; replace original daytime programming on BBC2 with repeats; transfer childrens programmes from BBC1 to CBBC; use BBC3 and BBC4 as experimental feeder networks for BBC1 and BBC2; and reduce the evening output of BBC local radio, which almost nobody listens to.

I’m pleased to say that all these suggestions are now BBC policy. I hasten to add that this is not because I had any influence whatsoever, but because they are blindingly obvious solutions to the BBC’s economic plight. I’m now regretting I didn’t add a request to preserve risk-taking through live programmes. As the darkest phase of this recession starts to bite, we need more laughs. And what better way achieve that than to encourage television producers, presenters and performers to make fools of themselves for us, live in our own living rooms.

Last of the Summer Whine

I hope you’ve all remembered to fit your winter tyres. Having been cruelly teased with a glimpse of summer, there’s a rumour going about in weather circles that we’ll be under a foot of snow by the end of next week.

Nothing about our climate would surprise me. If the forecasters are right, then, it’s likely my winter tyres will be booked for their fitting precisely one day after the snows arrive, thereby consigning my car, like last year, to a three-month icy tomb.

I’ve always had a deep distrust of weather reports, stemming from my first job as a reporter on BBC local radio.

Every Friday all the journalists in the newsroom would descend on the local pub and spend the entire afternoon drunkenly playing away their wages on poker. As the most junior person, I was not only the designated driver, but also the mug that had to go back and read the 3 o’clock news and weather.

Quite often the official weather telex wouldn’t show up, so I’d just look out the window and make it up.

“It’ll be quite cloudy in about 20 minutes”, I’d say confidently, and it always was. The listeners must have marveled at the accuracy. If there were any viewers: the station was a bit short on feedback, which is presumably why nobody rang up to complain when I accidentally switched the station over to Radio 4 for a whole hour.

My wife, who’s from Los Angeles, where the average October temperature is 80 degrees Fahrenheit and the threat of forest fires lasts till November, agreed to relocate to Northumberland only because I took her to the Roman Wall during our previous warm spell in August 2006. Do you remember that week? There was a fire warning in Kielder Forest. We had ice cream and I wore shorts.

Ever since I’ve been pretending it’s just a bit of a cold snap. I fear that, after five years, this argument is wearing thin. It was so sweet to see Jo’s glowing face on Thursday as the sun warmed up our Californian sun loungers: since we brought them over they’ve been shivering unoccupied on the terrace.

However I know last week’s warmth spells only trouble. As the cold mist descended on our valley yesterday and the barbecue cover was put back on, the subject of furry boots and winter coats was top of Jo’s agenda.

Still, even though it’s just a meteorological blip, it was still nice to see brightness in the middle of the gloom. I only wish our business community could experience something similar. For them it’s been a perpetual perfect storm of uncontrollable turmoil.

So I was surprised to see, at the regional CBI’s annual dinner in Newcastle the other night, a room crammed with jolly, optimistic faces. There was, if not exactly confidence, certainly enough exuberance in the air and a gritty determination to see this recession through.

That’s what I love about the North East. When the rest of the country writes us off, and they always do (don’t you love the raised eyebrows in London when you say you’re from Newcastle?), when they scrap our development agency without consultation and replace it with a system no one wants and a fraction of the money we had before, run from London of course, when the state-run railway puts up the cost of an ordinary second class London return to £287, we just plough on. We know we’re part of a team that everyone thinks is destined for relegation, but we’re here for the long term.

Like our footballers (sorry, Sunderland supporters, this bit is not for you), we may not have too many star strikers, but when we pull together, and support each other, we simply can’t be beaten. Who needs Carroll, anyway? We wouldn’t have a Tevez if he was sent to us on a free transfer wrapped in Argentinian fillet steak. We know we’re on our own up here, just waiting for the growth to happen.

Come on, you coalition chaps talking hot air in your warm Manchester conference, send us some quickly, before we all freeze to death.

The Day The World Changed

 
The messenger’s bike was chained to a green lamppost. Red, white and blue plastic roses and an American flag stuck into the grey dust on its handlebars, it stood waiting patiently for its owner to return. He never did. The bike had become a symbol of the thousands of innocent lives thrown away. It’s my most haunting memory of 9/11. That and the stench, acrid and lingering, the smell of burning concrete, which still permeated downtown Manhattan a month after the horror.

Down in the hellhole behind the hoardings, the remains of the twin towers were piled like a huge smoking bonfire, many stories high. Out of them, two iconic metal structures, like the ruined facades of a huge cathedral, pointed towards the sky. How men worked in those scalding, foul conditions, I'll never know, but the searching never ceased: it would be another six months before all the debris, human and architectural, was removed.

On the streets of Lower Manhattan, there was the most haunting, sobering atmosphere. Locals, workers, visitors like me, everyone walked silently with shocked respect. The only sound was the relentless pounding and whirring of the machines and cranes down in the rubble below. Sometimes, all too infrequently, they too were muted – as another body, or part of a body, was released from its dust-covered tomb and firemen and workers stopped to pay their respects. We all knew the world had changed forever: this was the human side of the devastation.

St Paul’s Church, a few yards from the epicentre of the disaster, or “ground zero” as the news operations had called it, had become a place of refuge and recuperation.

Workers slept in the pews, food was sent it by local restaurants, pedicures and massages were offered for worn limbs or burnt feet.
I watched exhausted firemen queuing for coffee and comfort. By night, back in the clean luxury of my hotel room in Union Square, I looked across the 30 or so blocks to the floodlights where the twin towers had been, unable to get the terrible images of September 11th out of my mind.

It was one of those seminal moments, like the death of Princess Diana. Right now, television networks are full of recollections, repeats and re-enactments. Of course this is an event the world must never be allowed to forget, but we should beware lest overfamiliarity weakens the shock of those terrible images; the live television pictures that day were the most appalling the world has ever seen.

We watched the world change in high-definition clarity, thanks to a perfect blue sky over a smogless morning. Everyone remembers where they were: I was in my London office, on the phone to Jane Root, one of the BBC’s Controllers, when the second plane hit. A pause, and then “Oh my God”, we said in unison, and Jane added “I’d better go” as she rushed off to cancel her programme schedule. I remember the fear and the rumours in my office: would London be next?

I came to New York a month later because ABC had asked us to make a Christmas special for them. Challenge America, it was called, based on the British show. Erin Brockovitch became Anneka, but we needed a project. The problem was where to start: there was so much devastation, yet most workers in the city were still digging for bodies at Ground Zero.

So we restored a little theatre close by and threw a party for the children of the victims. It was the first building project in the city since the disaster, and Mayor Giuliani came to launch it. But it was just a tiny drop in the ocean, and seemed an inadequate response to the enormity of the problem. We mended their theatre, but the looks on the faces of the children showed that it would take so much more than a television programme to rebuild their lives, so cruelly destroyed on that horrible day.

Potty Training with Russell Harty

"So what was your first impression of Russell Harty?"

It wasn’t a trick question, and I should have seen it coming – on Thursday, ITV brought me all the way to London for an interview about the late chatshow host. But it still caught me unprepared.

Amazing Grace Bashes Harty Shock

I’d carefully rehearsed in my head all my usual anecdotes about Diana Dors, Oliver Reed, Dirk Bogarde and the myriad other celebrities Russell had interviewed during the years I was his producer. I had a store of tales of encounters with Kenneth Williams, Frankie Howerd and other long-deceased comedians, or prickly meetings with Hollywood super-egos like Shirley McLaine. I’d rehearsed in my head what I would say about Russell’s national notoriety following the Grace Jones incident, about the rent boy story in the News Of The World, and his subsequent illness and death.

I wanted to talk about his humanity and humour, his vulnerability and honesty. But recalling an image of when we first met? I couldn’t even picture where it was. At the BBC? In a Notting Hill restaurant? In Russell’s basement flat with its bachelor-yellow walls and walnut grand piano? Memory plays such tricks with your brain, it’s hard to be precise about events of thirty years ago. That’s when the BBC summoned me back from a year’s sabbatical in India to become Russell’s producer.

At that time my first son Ben was barely an embryo: Russell later became his godfather. By the end of the third series of chatshows, he was talking in sentences and just about potty trained – Ben that is: Russell never used a sentence when a whole paragraph would do. Potty-training Ben was easier than producing the mercurial Mr Harty: though, sadly, I can’t recall any of that process either, to my wife’s frustration.

Izzy relaxes after a long session of potty-training

Right now, Izzy is talking fluently, saying American words like cookie, sneaker and diaper in a posh English accent. Especially the last, for now the time has come for her to cross the divide and cast away the Pampers. Yet I find I have absolutely no recollection of how to achieve this vitally important stage of parenthood.

I can clearly picture Ben’s white disposable nappies – no cartoon characters or triple layers in those days – but the fog of forgetfulness won’t let me recall how we banished them. As a result, I’m distracted from my writing by the sight of Izzy running across the lawn, shorts round her ankles and Jo in hot pursuit carrying a plastic pink Peppa Pig potty, urging her to sit down. She catches her, too late of course. The dogs witnessing this display appear to be laughing as much as I am: I just hope the image stays in my brain for long enough for me to be able to share it with Izzy’s first boyfriend.

Back in the ITV interview, I suppose I could have invented some neat anecdote. That’s what they do on talk shows. Nicely honed stories, told to the researcher beforehand, noted down on the question cards. “You’ve had some strange acquatic experiences haven’t you?” comes the host’s unsubtle prompt, and out pops a pat answer about scuba-diving with David Jason.

Russell hated all that. He liked to interview people, not names. Celebrity didn’t make people interesting, personality sometimes did. Which is one reason his interviewing technique was often criticised: he liked people, not reputations or press releases. At times that could sound curt, even rude, but his bluntness derived from interest, not sycophancy.

Russell Harty 1934-1988
(with faithful M&S pullover)

So instead, I descended into the blank of my memory, and pulled out Russell’s dark blue Marks & Spencer pullover and his blue-grey sensible shoes. He wore them every day, in the office, in restaurants, at home. Not at all the garb of a star. So I said he appeared to be, well, "unstarry". It sounded most inadequate, but it was absolutely true.

Chip Off The Old Block

When my eldest son Ben was little, he became a magician.

He called himself Benjamin Bonkers and would entertain our friends’ younger children with toy rabbits and hats. Until, one day, he accidentally set fire to his sister’s hair and Mum banned him from further performances. So instead, Ben set his heart on becoming an actor.

We did all we could to dissuade him. As a producer and director, I know how difficult it is to scratch any sort of living on stage or in front of the cameras. Did he want to be unemployed for most of the rest of his life? The producers have the creative ideas and do the hiring, I told him, the players are mere employees at the bottom of the creative food chain. That’s not strictly true, of course – a good actor can be the making of a successful project – but his mother and I were getting desperate.

After enduring several years of interminable school plays, during which we failed to discern the slightest hint of latent stardom, we finally suggested he might consider following his Dad into a career behind the cameras. Ben snorted with derision at the suggestion. I produced popular down-market shows like Challenge Anneka and Star for a Night: fit only for BBC1 on Saturday nights. He was an artiste. Visits to television studios and location left him cold. We sighed and waited.

Sure enough, after A-Levels, the inevitable happened. He announced that he’d decided to study film and television at university. And, to my great relief, he shone. He has a cinematic eye I never quite developed, and he’s great with crew and actors. He’s directed commercials, won prizes for his short films, and he’s very good with comedy, perhaps the most difficult genre of all. He has a penchant for the surreal which more than matches my own, and this year he finally achieved his first major goal when he was asked to direct an hour-long network television drama. Sure, it was only BBC1 on Saturday night, but his episode of Casualty was a tour de force. It made me cry, and that was the programme, not just the sight of my son’s first onscreen credit.

Last week, en route to the Edinburgh Film Festival where he’s making contacts for his first feature film, he dropped off in Newcastle to give me my Father’s Day present. It was the ultimate gift: he directed one of my films.

It was just a short project (I say “just – in this recessed climate, any work is useful for a production company), but it was pretty ambitious. It involved all the things Ben is good at, like comedy, actors, and a surreal script. In the kitchen of a dingy basement restaurant in the city centre, with the cast caked in fake blood and sweat, I heard him shout “Action!” for the first time and I can’t begin to measure the pride. We were, for one day only, a father and son team.

It’s hard to express quite how that feels. Working together with your firstborn is something that transcends ordinary human endeavour. Now I think I understand the satisfaction that butchers and grocers must feel as they add “& Son” to their own name above the shopfront. As an old block, it was great to see my young chip bossing around the actors and crew just like his Dad. The weirdest feeling was that he now has my voice. In the edit a few days later, it was impossible to tell us apart.

"Best Leave It To The Expert, Dad..."  [all photos by David Bridges]

The final result is as good as I could have hoped for. Viewing one particularly nice shot, I asked Ben, “How did you do that?” Quick as a flash came the response: “It’s not magic, Dad”.  Quite.

My Worst Christmas

FOR SALE

The BBC has announced the sale of one of Britain’s most iconic buildings: Television Centre. For me that vast circle of studios, like a giant question mark topped by glass-fronted offices, stirs up mixed emotions. Set in the wasteland of Shepherds Bush, within spitting distance of QPR’s football ground, it was the scene of the highest points of my BBC career, and also the lowest. For this was where, in 1971, I spent the most miserable Christmas of my life.

As a student desperate for any start in television, I’d secured a vacation job in the mailroom. They put me in a section called “Incoming Mail”. There were 15 middle-aged women and me. Our job was to open every letter sent to the BBC.

Quite why we had to do this, we weren’t sure. Nobody actually told us to look for anything – like evidence of communists, Payola, or ITV headhunters. We just opened the envelopes, stapled them to the contents, and put them in mailboxes to be delivered by men with trollies round long the circular corridors. This repetitive job turned out to be a perfect career springboard. For, by surreptitious reading of the mail, I soon identified all the key producers. All I had to do was meet them.

The head of the mail service, a man called Mr Beasley, with a voice of gravel and a heart of gold, took me under his wing and let me play the “lost post” game. If I spotted a letter to a person I wanted to meet, he let me hold it back from the mail run and go upstairs to deliver it myself. In this way I met the man who gave me my first proper job after university.

In the 1970s ‘TC’, as it was called to all who worked there, was the most exciting place in the world. The circle comprised 8 busy studios – 4 large, 3 small, and, at the bottom of the question mark, behind the familiar BBC Television Centre sign, the biggest studio in Europe, a cavernous space full of lights, cameras and memories called TC1. In my meal breaks I would rush upstairs to the observation galleries and watch the filming of Top of the Pops and Doctor Who. Sometimes friendly studio managers let me inside to see some of the most famous names on television performing their stuff: from Morecambe & Wise to The Two Ronnies.

10 years after I joined the mailroom, I became the director of the General Election, the largest programme ever produced from the building, which simultaneously utilised every studio except TC1. That had been reserved for an entertainment series called “The Hot Shoe Show”. I was the producer of that programme too.

This was undoubtedly the high point – the following year I handed in my resignation and started my own company. But, back in 1971, my enthusiasm for life in this incredible building was marred by an unfortunate incident involving, as happened all too often in my life, a beautiful woman.

At university I had fallen in unrequited lust for a blond first-year called Nicky. Having pointedly shunned my advances all term, one day she asked if we might share a flat in London over the holidays. As the only ‘flat’ we could afford was a single-roomed bedsit, I couldn’t believe my luck. I’d be sharing a room with the most beautiful girl in the world: it was the best Christmas ever.

Sadly, on the first night, my world disintegrated. Paul, tanned and Australian, lived in the room next door. It took him less than 20 minutes to seduce my Nicky. The walls were very thin. On New Year’s Eve they stayed in for a night of romance and I trudged, in freezing rain, to seek solace in the bar at Television Centre. It was shut.

By 2015 it will have closed forever: but the memories remain.